Bill Kirby Jr.: A morning walk long ago remembered

Imagine, if you will, two women on their morning walk along Winterlochen Road long ago, and both with a vision for a better community.

Still, Mary Lynn McCree Bryan can recall those days in her mind's eye.

“Lucile and I walked in the mornings and we talked about things in this community,” Bryan, 80, says about her friend Lucile West Hutaff. “And things that could happen if we just tried.”

Lucile Hutaff, diagnosed with lung cancer, was dying.

“She said, 'I'm not going to make it,'” Bryan says about Hutaff, who had established and underwritten what today is the Cumberland Community Foundation with a $576,000 unrestricted gift in 1980. “She was my first real friend here.”

Hutaff knew Bryan had knowledge and expertise in overseeing a similar foundation in Chicago, and she would ask Bryan to promise her to see the foundation would continue in this community for the betterment of humankind.

“She said, “I want you to do this for me, and for this community,'” Bryan says. “The next day, she died.”

Lucile Hutaff died July 1, 1987.

She was 75.

Today, the Cumberland Community Foundation has assets of $80 million, and has touched lives by the thousands, including 518 current endowments, according to Mary Holmes, the foundation's executive director.

“Where would the arts be in our community without the Cape Fear Botanical Garden, the Cape Fear Regional Theatre, the Fayetteville Symphony, the Arts Council of Fayetteville-Cumberland County,” Libby Daniel, the foundation president, would say Friday at the foundation's annual holiday social to honor the many who give for a community's better tomorrows. “How would we protect children without the Child Advocacy Center, the Partnership for Children or youth in need without the Boys & Girls Club, Communities in Schools, Fayetteville Urban Ministry/Find a Friend, Communities United for Youth Development, St. Ann Youth Center, and Youth for Christ? How would we improve health in our community without Better Health and The CARE Clinic? Imagine education in our community without Fayetteville Technical Community College, Fayetteville State University and Methodist University. Or without our award-winning library system. Who would teach us about our past, so we can improve our future without the N.C. Civil War History Center? And who would preserve our historic buildings without the Heritage Square Historical Society.”

Don't forget, Daniel would remind, the Vision Resource Center or the Friendship House and Service Source or the Cumberland County Council on Older Adults, the Highlands Chapter of the American Red Cross, Operation Inasmuch, Second Harvest Food Banks and The Salvation Army.

“How would we fund all this work without the United Way, the Junior League, the McLean Foundation, local foundations,” Daniel would say, “and of course, our growing community foundation? On behalf of the Cumberland Community Foundation, we want to thank all of you – nonprofits, volunteers and donors – for making life better in this community.”

And this would be a day when the foundation would give grateful applause to past board members from Jesse Byrd to the late Al Cleveland, and to Mary Lynn Bryan.

“Without question, your greatest gift you gave us was to bring this lady to this community,” he would say, “and we are so much richer for it. I've often heard we give too many of these, but I would say there's not a single person who ever would dispute this award for this distinguished lady.”

Richardson would present Mary Lynn Bryan with the Order of the Long Leaf Pine from Gov. Roy Cooper for her 24 years serving with the Cumberland Community Foundation, and twice as its president, as well as her long service with the Methodist University board of trustees and a litany of organizations that would stretch along Interstate 95, north and south.

“I told Norwood we would get married, but I was coming to a community I didn't know or a community that would not know me,” Mary Lynn Bryan would say. “But I knew I brought a lot of experience and interests.”

Her background includes studies of Jane Addams, the Nobel Peace Prize humanitarian who died in 1935, and Bryan would become curator of the Jane Addams-Hull House in Chicago from 1966-1973 and later editor of the Jane Addams Papers from 1983 to 2013 as a history professor at Duke University.

“Jane Addams was an American heroine,” she would say. “I never met her. I never knew or saw her. But she thought helping others was important, and moving the world forward. I think that way, too. Thank you for letting me share my life with you, and I am grateful to be a part of you.”

Mary Lynn Bryan later would think back to those morning walks with Lucile Hutaff, the professor at Bowman-Gray Medical School and a local Coca-Cola heiress, and the promise she once made to her friend to do her best for the Cumberland Community Foundation.

“She had a wonderful idea, and I think she would be happy and fulfilled,” Bryan would say. “It's made up with gifts from all walks of life. That's the beauty of it – it belongs to everybody.”